FAA preps major space reforms

PRE-FLIGHT BRIEFING

TODAY: CHINA’s HISTORIC MOON MISSION. China’s space agency today plans to launch the first-ever mission to study the far side of the moon. The launch of the robotic Chang’e 4, aboard a Long March 3B rocket, is scheduled to take place around 1:30 pm EST. The journey to the South Pole-Aitken Basin is scheduled to take 27 days.

It’s a major development in the new moon race, says Dennis Wingo, a veteran space engineer and author of the pioneering "Moonrush: Improving Life on Earth with the Moon's Resources." Both China and India, he says, “have embarked upon rigorous, well thought-out programs to establish permanent presence on the lunar surface.” And in his view they are more serious about industrializing it than NASA, which he thinks still largely views space in idealistic terms, “as a place for wonder and grandeur and exploration and science.”

“These other countries look at it in a much more utilitarian fashion: in order to make our lives better here on earth we need resources from space,” Wingo says. You can watch China's historic mission begin here.

FAA PLANS BIG MOVES ON SPACEPORTS, LAUNCH RULES. The FAA is going to be busy over the holidays. The Spaceport Categorization Aviation Rulemaking Committee, established last year, will submit a report by the end of the year on ways to “develop clear and useful spaceport categories” as more states and localities fuel up their commercial space operations, Daniel Elwell, the acting administrator, told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on Thursday.

“This is largely uncharted water for us,” he said. “It’s hard to imagine that we’re at the place where airport and spaceport are used in the same sentence—but here we are.” Elwell said. But “equally important to the FAA and the commercial space community is the airspace above the spaceport,” he added. A separate rulemaking committee, which will also report by the end of the year, is “looking at how we accommodate operations today and how new user needs and constraints might impact access in the future.”

Next up: new launch regs in February. A vastly condensed and more user friendly set of regulations are coming in February from the FAA that will allow space launch companies to “spend far less time reviewing and more time launching,” Elwell also told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “In short order, we’re getting rid of rules that have outlived their usefulness or are unnecessarily burdensome.”

Licensing and safety paperwork will go from some 400 pages of multiple regs into a singleregulation that will be far less prescriptive, he reported. “We’ll tell the industry the target and you’ll tell us how you’ll hit it,” he said. The pressure to deregulate came straight from the top. “The White House has it in for bureaucracy,” Elwell added.

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IN ORBIT

EUROPE SPACE CHIEF: REPORT SATELLITE LOCATIONS: The head of the European Space Agency is urging all spacefaring nations to share satellite location data every quarter to avoid collisions. Johann-Dietrich Woerner said such transparency will help everyone protect their assets but also acknowledged it would be a tough sell for the national security community.

“[What] is the sense of knowing only the civil satellites and then having a collision with the military satellites?” he argued at an event Thursday co-hosted by the Secure World Foundation and ESA. “I don’t want to know what the military satellites are doing, but it’s better to know about their orbits.”

"It’s going to get worse before it gets better" — due to the thousands of additional satellites that are planned, according to Jim Cooper, the senior systems engineer of space situational awareness at Analytical Graphics Inc. For example, if SpaceX launches a constellation of 4,000 small satellites as planned, the company will have a 50-50 chance of having a collision over the next decade, he predicted.If they receive an alert anytime an object comes within three kilometers they’ll get almost four million warnings over 10 years. “What do I do with that? My hair is on fire and I panic,” Cooper described the conundrum.

‘MAJOR’ SPACE EXERCISE ON TAP. The U.S. military will have a “major exercise” early next year to clarify how the new U.S. Space Command will be structured, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Joseph Dunford said Thursday during a Q&A with The Washington Post. He compared the new unified command, which the Pentagon can create without approval from Congress, to U.S. Transportation Command or Special Operations Command, two military headquarters that have no geographic boundaries.

NASA, HHS DOCK ON SPACE MEDICINE. The Department of Health and Human Services and NASA have inked an interagency agreement to conduct “scientific research that would benefit humanity on Earth and on individuals traveling to the Moon and beyond,” Eric Hargan, deputy secretary of HHS, said Thursday.

The space agency’s top research interests include “cardiac rhythm problems, inadequate nutrition and food systems, adverse cognitive or behavioral conditions, and the detection and treatment of unknown microbes,” Hargan said. Also on the wish list: “autonomous portable medical capabilities for remote locations, long shelf life and manufacturing of pharmaceuticals, and improved tools to deal with isolation and confinement.”

Also covered under the new umbrella agreement are the National Institutes of Health, which already had its own pact with NASA, along with the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; the Food and Drug Administration; and the Administration for Community Living.

NASA BEAMED INTO UFO DEBATE. A NASA scientist made some waves this week when a research paper he co-authored calling for greater efforts to determine if extraterrestrials have visited Earth was seized upon by the UFO community hit the media. Silvano Colombano from NASA’s Intelligent Systems Division argues in the March paper that NASA needs to question its assumptions about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

The UFO community went into hyper space over what one called “another little crack in the taboo.” But some got carried away, suggesting that Colombano had reported that space aliens have been here. "It is not accurately represented," Colombano said of his work. "My perspective was simply that reports of unidentified aerial phenomena should be the object of serious study, even if the chance of identification of some alien technology is very small."

Indeed, his paper calls on NASA to study “speculative physics” to “stretch possibilities as to the nature of space-time and energy”; assess how future robotic systems with artificial intelligence might contain a “symbiosis of biology and machine”; and “engage sociologists in speculation about what kinds of societies we might expect...and whether and how they might choose to communicate."

INDUSTRY INTEL: Air Force seeks to fuel more space start-ups. The Air Force Research Laboratory’s Catalyst Accelerator technology incubator, in its third casting of the net, is now accepting applications from start-ups with new ideas on how to make space communications more resilient. The 12-week program, which will begin in April in Colorado Springs, will include an immediate $15,000 seed investment as well as mentorship and networking opportunities. Applications are due January 30. Catalyst has received high marks so far for its work with new space entrants focused on weather and positioning, navigation and timing.

TOP DOC: Sharing the spectrum. How can the world meet a growing demand for connectivity when much of the radio frequency spectrum is already dedicated to vital functions like GPS and national security? One option is sharing spectrum, a finite resource managed by the government. A new paper from the The Aerospace Corporation’s Center for Space Policy and Strategy examines the different options and challenges like cyber security and interference.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: "This is America ... a brilliant diversity spread like stars, like a thousand points of light in a broad and peaceful sky." — former President George H.W. Bush, who was laid to rest this week, during his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in 1988.

READING ROOM

— Boeing, SpaceX racing to launch the first Americans from U.S. soil since 2011.

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About The Author : Jacqueline Feldscher

Jacqueline Feldscher is a national security reporter at POLITICO.

Prior to joining POLITICO, she covered defense from Capitol Hill and the Pentagon for the Washington Times and the Washington Examiner, where she was part of the team that launched the Daily on Defense newsletter. She began her journalism career at Navy Times, covering the Navy and Coast Guard.

She’s an alumna of Boston University and holds a masters in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.

About The Author : Bryan Bender

Bryan Bender is the defense editor for POLITICO Pro. He was previously a D.C.-based reporter for the Boston Globe and Jane’s Defence Weekly, where he covered U.S. military operations in the Middle East, Asia, Latin America, and the Balkans. He also writes about terrorism, the international arms trade, and government secrecy. He is author “You Are Not Forgotten,“ the story of an Iraq War veteran’s search for a missing World War II fighter pilot in the South Pacific. He is currently a board member of the Military Reporters and Editors Association.